Modal Launches Sidecars: Sandboxed Containers for Agent-Generated Code with 3x Faster Cross-Trust-Boundary Communication
AAAzzam · x · 2026-10-09
Modal's customers use Sandboxes to run untrusted code, now written almost exclusively by agents. Legacy isolation tech like gVisor and Firecracker solved isolation for an outdated unit of trust — protecting users from each other, not from their "own" agent code.
Modal introduces Sidecars: isolated containers running alongside the main Sandbox on the same host, providing a real security boundary between trusted and untrusted code, with roughly 3x faster communication across trust boundaries. The article traces the history of cloud isolation and why the old threat model no longer fits the agent era.
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